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Joshua Wolf Shenk's article "What Makes Us Happy," in the June 2009 issue of The Atlantic (available online at http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/06/what-makes-us-happy/307439/), about the longitudinal study by George Vaillant starting with Harvard sophomores and following them for the rest of their lives, quotes Case No. 47, the clown prince of the study, thusly:

“If you had your life to live over again,” the study asked you in 1981, “what problem, if any, would you have sought help for and to whom would you have gone?” “I’ve come to believe that ‘help’ is for the most part useless and destructive,” you answered. “Can you imagine Arlie Bock—God bless his soul—trying to help me work out my problems? … Or Clark Heath? The poor old boys would have headed for the hills! The ‘helping professions’ are in general camp-followers of the dominant culture..."

I am coming to think more like this all the time. I am still determined to be better than my old undergraduate advisor, since next year I will be the age he was when I first met him. I will still need to continue to write 80% of my M.S. students theses for them, mainly because they don't know doodley-squat about the subject matter (astrophysics), and whenever I give them books to read, they tell me they read them and yet still don't know doodly-squat about the subject matter (astrophysics). But this does help them get jobs as K-12 teachers, and the Fresno area sure needs them, so I will continue doing it with a clear conscience. What I am going to change is, from now on, not to take everything so personally!

That is, indeed, marvelous -- as well as all too sadly, maddeningly, frustratingly true. Neither students nor administrators seem to notice just how much wisdom is available for the asking (but all too infrequently asked for) in longterm faculty.

Ah, Greta. It's lovely to be back in your garden (I do envy you your garden, and, thanks to you, I've just discovered the Strutter's Ball daylily), and back reading your prose, even though it evokes all too poignantly the misery of teaching students who, quite possibly through no fault of their own, have much more experience of performing than of thinking.

Of course, I'm not entirely sure I'd survive the resulting chaos if all of mine actually started thinking at once (would the result be an unfinished tapestry or a gordian tangle of threads?). But I'd be willing to take the chance, especially if it cut down on the interminable "is this what you want?"s (which really only come from a small number of students, but somehow they, and the anxiety they carry, take up a lot of space).

I surfed into the blog July 4, out of nostalgia and not at all realizing that we were live again. I hadn't checked the Greta email account since the last time we shut down; I had no idea that we'd been resurrected. When I saw that we were for reals once more, the above haiku -- such as it is -- came to me on the spot.

I have missed this virtual water cooler more than I can say. I am acquaintances IRL with a contributor and it's been lovely to see her occasionally on Facebook, but every time I have seen her name in my feed, I've been reminded of how much this place has meant to me.

What Was This?

College Misery was a dysfunctional group blog where professors got the chance to release some of the frustration that built up while tending to student snowflakes, helicopter parents, money mad Deans, envious colleagues, and churlish chairpeople.

Our parent site, Rate Your Students, started in 2005, and we continued that mission beginning in 2010. Ben at Academic Water Torture and Kimmie at The Apoplectic Mizery Maker both ran support blogs during periods when this blog had died.